The invention relates generally to code-division multiple access systems and, in particular, to precoding techniques for reducing inteference in such systems.
A major problem for systems using code-division multiple access (CDMA) is that multipath fading can introduce multiuser interference (MUI) and intersymbol inteference (ISI). One technique to minimize the interference in direct sequence CDMA systems is referred to as “multiuser detection” (MUD), in which multiple transmitters (e.g., mobile units) send independent data streams to a single receiver (e.g., a base station) which performs complex signal processing algorithms to remove the MUI and ISI. Unfortunately, applying conventional multiuser detection to the downlink transmission rather than the uplink transmission faces a number of significant hurdles. For example, linear MUD techniques not only increase the complexity of the downlink receivers, they also require that the mobile units know the spreading sequence of the rest of the users.
One approach to addressing these issues is to transfer the decoding complexity of the receiver to the transmitter, a technique generally referred to as “precoding.” Transmitter precoding is an attractive solution for systems employing time-division multiplexing, where uplink and downlink channels are reciprocal to each other. A variety of linear precoding techniques have been proposed which obtain a good tradeoff between complexity and performance in a system with interchip inteference but without intersymbol interference. Intersymbol interference can be ignored through the introduction of guard intervals or because the spreading gain is much longer than the length of the multipath channel. In a system with intersymbol inteference, however, the complexity of such prior art systems becomes intractable since the matrix filter sizes are proportional to the frame length multiplied by the number of users (i.e., block processing).